SEARCH ANALYTICS: WHAT? WHY? HOW?

In two weeks Berlin Buzzwords opens it's doors. In this series of posts we are introducing a selection of talks in our schedule. Starting today with Otis: Otis Gospodnetić is a coauthor of Lucene in Action (1st and 2nd edition). He has been involved with Lucene since 2000 and Solr since 2006. He is also a member of Nutch, and Mahout development teams, as well as Lucene Project Management Committee. Otis is an Apache Software Foundation member and the founder of Sematext, a software development and consulting company focused on Search & Analytics using open-source technologies like Lucene, Solr, Nutch, Hadoop, HBase, Flume, and more.

You've indexed your data and people are searching it. But how do you know if they are happy with the results? How do you know if they are finding what they need? With search incresingly becoming the primary information access mechanism, knowing how your search is doing is not just a matter of mere curiosity, but often has direct business impact.

In this talk we'll talk about Search Analytics and how it can be used to answer questions like:

Are too many users getting the dreaded "no matches" results?
How deep into search results do people dig?
Which hits are they clicking on, or what percentage of them don't click on any hits?
How much do they use the Did You Mean or Auto-Complete suggestions?

We'll explore what specific Search Analytics reports tell us and what specific actions you should take based on those reports.